“Jesus, Beau. What are you doing?” Merten seemed in pain. He leaned closer. “I told you to stay by the airport.”
“Only we know where to find our Most Wanted.” Beau’s voice was deep and even, without emotion. “Only we know who they are, know they’re bad enough to stay behind, too entrenched to evacuate. Wasn’t hard to figure it had to be us.”
“Is he solid?” from the fourth man, the young unknown face leering at Beau.
The fifth man finally removed his goggles and stepped forward. Beau felt a weakness momentarily in his knees. Assistant Superintendent Ashton Garner, the man most NOPD felt should be Chief of Police, the former head of the Training Academy who’d trained his men and women to be like brothers and sisters. It was Garner who made them all feel as if NOPD was family. Us against the world.
Garner tapped the fourth man on the shoulder as he passed and said, “He’s as solid as they come. Notice he’s saying we and us and not ‘y’all did this,’ isn’t he?” Garner arrived next to Merten and stared Beau in the eyes. Beau gave him a poker-faced, lingering, emotionless stare in return.
“This is John Raven Beau,” Garner went on.
“Oh,” said the unknown man. “I hearda him. He’s killed more’n us.”
Killed, Beau thought, not executed, but he kept his mouth shut.
Merten shook his head. “Can’t believe you brought the rookie.”
Beau turned to him. “Looks like we’re all in this now.”
Garner took in a deep breath.
Beau stepped around them and moved to his partner, getting between her and the men, nodding for her to holster her weapon, which she did reluctantly. He turned back and told them where the boats were.
“We’ll show you.” He led Cruz through them to the top of the levee.
No one moved behind them for a few moments before Merten and Garner came along. When they reached the spot where the speedboat was tied up, Beau pointed to it, then turned back to face his lieutenant and assistant superintendent. He waited until the stragglers arrived before he said, “That better be the last one.”
“Who the hell are you to tell us that?” snapped the unknown man. “What is your major malfunction? Man, we nailed Abdon Jeffries, didn’t we?” He raised the high-powered rifle in his hands, the one with the big scope. So this was the sniper, the triggerman.
Beau stared into Garner’s eyes. “If I figured this out, someone else will. And there’s no ‘us’ with the Feds. They’ll nail every one of us, me and Cruz, too, because we know.”
He waited for the recognition to come to Garner’s eyes. He turned to Merten with, “So we’re in this together and tonight’s the last one.”
Beau took Cruz by the arm and they went on to the pirogue, neither looking back. As they were climbing into the flat-bottom boat they heard the angry growl of the speedboat as it backed into the lake, growling louder as it pulled into the dark waters.
Just after they’d passed the 17th Street Canal, they hit something in the water and the outboard died. Beau got it started but it wouldn’t propel them. He raised it and saw why. They’d lost the propeller. So they grabbed the oars and rowed the pirogue over to the Bucktown levee, pulled it up on the grass, and shoved the anchor into the ground before going to the top of the levee to wait for dawn.
Cruz lay on her back, hands behind her head, knees up. Beau sat cross-legged, like a plains warrior sitting around a campfire, and looked out at the lake. He faced the eastern horizon and waited. Motionless, except for breathing and blinking, Beau watched the horizon. He tried his best to keep his heart from racing, as it had when the shadowy figures had closed in on him on the levee. But his heart raced as he watched the horizon; goosebumps covered his arms.
John Raven Beau hadn’t been frightened since he was a kid. There was no fear when he’d gunned down the men he’d chased, no fear when their bullets whizzed past his face with the sound of an angry hornet. As a child he’d been frightened, as most children, of wild sounds coming from the swamp at night, of imagined bogeymen. He’d been frightened when his grandfather told him about Coyote-man, the mythical enemy of the plains warriors, the Sioux and their cousins, the Cheyenne. Stories of the sly trickster who stole the breath from babies, leaving them cold and dead, of tricks played on battlefields when a warrior’s bow broke or an arrow didn’t run straight or a pony tripped on a gopher hole, sending its rider crashing to the ground. Coyote-man drew warriors to watery deaths in lakes and swollen rivers where their soul would never escape, for a warrior who drowned could never rise from the depths.
Beau knew better than to think it was Coyote-man who drew Katrina’s hot winds to New Orleans, knew the myth was just that — a myth. But something drew the storm here. Something drew it from the gulf. Steering currents, or was it, after all, the rotted breath of Coyote-man that sucked the storm ashore? And was the trickster sitting on a rooftop cackling at Beau as he studied the horizon wondering if it would be the same sun rising in the east?
When the sun finally rose, with Juanita Cruz gently dozing next to him, Beau felt a hammering in his chest as he watched the sky turn from black to charcoal gray then lighten into reddish orange before streaming into yellow. It was the same sun and it made him feel as if his heart would collapse from the pain.
“What is it?” The voice came from a distance. “What is it?” It was a familiar voice. He turned to it but only saw a blur. He wiped his eyes and it was his partner, sitting up now, staring at him, her brows furrowed.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Beau felt his head shake, felt his heart hurting so badly he wondered how he could breathe. He looked back at the sun. It should be off-kilter, askew, every object should be a fraction of an inch from its true place. Everything was wrong, but nothing looked wrong. It was the same sun.
He looked back at his partner and told her that.
“You’re not making sense,” she said, brushing grass from her pants.
“Don’t you see?” he heard himself say.
“No.” She looked him in the eye again and said, “You talking about back there? What they’re doing, isn’t it what we’d all like to do sometimes? Just clean house.”
Beau felt himself shivering in the heated air. “On purpose,” he said. “They’re even leaving the bodies to be found on purpose, so word’ll get out.”
“Sure,” Cruz said. “You said it. Word to the criminals. See what we can do when we want to.”
The pain still shot through his heart but Beau could breathe now. He needed the breath to explain. “We don’t do that.”
Cruz leaned back, a haughty look on her face. “You saying it’s bad?”
“No. I’m saying we don’t do that. We kill... I killed... when I had no choice. It was me or them. We don’t execute people.”
“It bothers you that Killboy’s dead? That cop-shooting Abdon guy? I forget the third one.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, hell, you said it: Everything’s changed. The whole damn world’s changed.”
Cruz looked at him a long while before getting up and holding out her hand to pull him up. He grabbed it after a few seconds and she tugged him up. Beau looked back at the city, at the roofs protruding from brown water like cypress stumps in a bayou. He felt the stab again in his heart.
“Is that why you were crying?” Cruz asked.
“No. Yes. Maybe.” How could he explain it when he didn’t know? A plains warrior didn’t cry. They never showed their emotions like the white-eyes. Maybe it was his Cajun side. Certainly his father would not have hidden his emotions if he saw the great Louisiana city, la Nouvelle Orléans, inundated in brown water.